‘First of all, though,’ she said, ‘we’re going on holiday!’
I couldn’t believe it. We were to spend a week at the Middleton Tower Holiday Camp near Morecambe, Lancashire. Dad was to be admitted for surgery soon after we got back but I didn’t worry about his operation in the slightest. All I could think about was our impending break, which was the first proper holiday we’d ever had. The camp was like nothing I had ever seen. Set in sixty acres with nine hundred chalets, its dining rooms and cafeterias could feed three thousand people. The main building, which had a theatre and a dance floor, was modelled on a Cunard cruise ship called the SS Berengaria. We were joined by my mum’s mother Ada – or ‘Nanny’ as I called her, who was a traditional cuddly grandmother from Ellesmere Port. Then there was Aunt Bessie, who brought her daughters, my cousins, Barbara, Linda and Janet. My brother Peter, who was sixteen, brought along a couple of friends.
Even though my father wasn’t very well he still drew people to him and he and my mother were so lovely on that holiday – like newlyweds. They danced together most nights and I can remember watching them on the dance floor and feeling a little jealous. Later, my lovely dad made sure to dance just with me. Best of all, he won a bingo prize of sixty pounds which more than paid for the holiday. He was so happy.
Soon after we came home, Dad was admitted to Chester City Hospital where he was expected to stay for two weeks. We were planning to visit him one night after school but Mum said there had been a complication and that he needed peace and quiet. ‘He’ll be home soon,’ she told us, sensing our disappointment. I couldn’t wait. The house felt so empty without his laughing presence.
The day he was due to be discharged I hurried back from school, excitedly skipping along in front of our row of terraced houses, the gardens of which sloped to the road. As usual, the other mothers were standing by their gates or leaning across their garden fences, chatting to each other as they waited for their children to come home. But on that particular afternoon, something unusual happened. One by one, the women stopped talking, turned, and walked back up their paths without saying hello to me. I remember thinking how strange that was as I danced on by.
Dad wasn’t waiting at our garden gate as I’d hoped he might be. Swallowing my disappointment, I ran inside and found my mother in the kitchen. ‘Is he home?’ I asked breathlessly.
She bent down and took my hands in hers. ‘Yes, Pauline, but he’s in bed. He’s still not very well. Why don’t you go up and see if he recognizes you?’
I ran up the stairs two at a time wondering what Mum meant. Of course Daddy would recognize me – he’d only been away two weeks. But the man lying in my parents’ bed hardly even looked like my father. The shock froze me halfway across the room.
‘Dad?’
His eyes flickered open and he turned to look at me, but didn’t respond. Taking a step forward, I reached for his hand. It lay limply in mine. ‘Daddy? It’s Pauline.’
He closed his eyes again and I stood stock still, uncertain what to do. If only he’d open them and say, ‘Hi, baby.’ He often referred to me as ‘baby’, which I loved.
My mother came into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Something happened during the operation,’ she said. Her voice was strange. ‘It’s left Daddy a bit confused.’
He remained ‘confused’ for the rest of the day and by evening Mum was so worried that she summoned a doctor, who called an ambulance. I stood silently on the landing as two men manhandled my father past me on a stretcher.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Dad asked them, his eyes fearful.
‘To a lovely hotel, Ernie,’ one of the ambulance men replied, giving his colleague a conspiratorial wink.
I was furious. How dare they talk to my father as if he were stupid! I wanted to push them down the stairs and out of the house.
Visiting the hospital over the next few days wasn’t at all as I’d imagined it would be. When we got there we had to sit quietly at the side of the bed while Mum gently woke my father. Sometimes he would recognize us but often he didn’t. The doctors said he’d suffered a blood clot on the brain during the operation. Only once did he seem to know who I was. He looked at me, turned to my mum and said, ‘The baby’s too skinny. She’s doing too much dancing.’
He never called me baby again.
When Auntie Ivy came up from Southampton with her husband Len and daughter Anne, I knew things were serious. A week later, on 8 July 1953, my father died. We didn’t have a telephone but they somehow sent word from the hospital. He had a type of cancer known as Hodgkin’s disease, the doctors told my mother, although it didn’t really matter that it had a name. His death certificate also cited cerebral haemorrhage as a secondary cause of death.
Dad did come home then, but in a wooden coffin that rested on trestles in the middle of the living room so that friends and family could pay their respects. I was terrified of that open box with the white gauze cloth draped loosely over my father’s frozen expression. I was only fourteen years old; I’d never seen a dead body before. The room had a sweet, sickly smell, which I suppose was to mask the formaldehyde. All I knew was that the cloying scent stuck to the back of my throat.
For three days, people came and went. Whenever I was summoned by my mother to say hello to our guests, I would creep in and cling to the walls, walking around the edge of the room and averting my gaze. My mother finally asked me, ‘Why won’t you look at your father, Pauline?’
I hesitated before whispering, ‘I’m frightened.’
Mum sat me down. ‘He never hurt you when he was alive,’ she told me, ‘and he certainly won’t hurt you now that he’s dead.’
Dad had been a choirboy at St Mary’s in Handbridge, so his funeral was held there. Mum bought me a lovely new skirt and top and everyone kept hugging me and creasing it. The church was filled with flowers and people, including fellow Marines and colleagues from the BICC factory where Dad had worked. The vicar, who’d known my father as a boy, said that he’d been an excellent footballer, a model member of the community and a good family man. My mum was more upset than I had ever seen her and kept dabbing her eyes behind her spectacles with a white lace handkerchief. I didn’t know what to do to stop her crying. Peter was as white as a sheet and didn’t say a word.
Dad was buried in the family plot at Blacon on the other side of Chester. As I watched clods of earth shovelled on to the lid of his coffin, I thought to myself, Well, he was forty. That’s really old.
Going home to an empty house felt stranger still. No more coffin; no more sickly smell. People didn’t come to pay their respects any more and it was just the three of us with no Dad bursting in from work to put on a record, roll back the carpet and pull my mother or me into a laughing waltz. It was peculiar going back to school without even Peter for company. I was the only child who’d lost a father in my class and that made me feel very different – older, I guess, and more lonely.
My mother had one really good black-and-white photograph of my dad, which she cherished. A few weeks after he died, she took me with her to Will R. Rose’s, a famous photographer’s studio in Chester. ‘I’d like this hand-coloured and enlarged, please,’ she told the man behind the counter, handing him the precious photo.
‘Certainly, madam,’ he said, studying the picture of my smiling dad. ‘Tell me, what colour are his eyes?’
My mother faltered. ‘He had the most beautiful blue eyes…’ she said, trying to hold herself together. After that, she couldn’t say another word.
I THINK WHAT SAVED ME DURING THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS AFTER MY FATHER